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We're at the end of another successful Summer Reading program, and we couldn't have done it without the commitment of our employees and their enthusiasm and teamwork. Also crucial to the program's success are the 349 teen volunteers who worked hour after hour signing up participants, handing out incentives, assisting with programs, reading to children, and doing dozens of other support activities. Thank you all for training and supporting our teen volunteers for the last two months.

The literary world lost a giant this week when E. L. Doctorow died July 21 of complications from lung cancer. Doctorow’s immigrant parents named him for Edgar Allan Poe when he was born in The Bronx in 1931. Although he knew he wanted to become a writer in third grade, as an adult Doctorow worked for nearly a decade as a book editor for such legends as Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand and as editor-in-chief responsible for works by James Baldwin and Norman Mailer among others. After reading hundreds of scripts for movie westerns, Doctorow decided he’d had enough when, “It occurred to me that I could lie about the West in a much more interesting way than any of these people were lying.”

Boogie back to 1978 when we all caught Saturday Night Fever, kept up with the feathered-hair housewives of Dallas, and breathed easier when asbestos and lead-based paint were banned in the United States. The Soviet Union launched two cosmonauts into space to rendezvous with the Salyut VI space lab.

It was "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" and it changed the world forever. Relive the excitement and glory of this crowning achievement of the Space Age as Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 fly to the moon.

Welcome back to 1969 when Neil Armstrong took “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” during the Apollo 11 moon landings. Oklahoma County Libraries (as we were known then) celebrated our fifth anniversary by launching a robust automation program. We shared costs on a $253,000 IBM System/360 Model 25 computer with the Oklahoma County Assessor’s office to automate a number of library services.